Personal note and Particle Properties of a String

A friend asked me a couple questions about strings so I thought I would try to better explain that in my blog as I will quote some from my book. But first.. I thought I would share my personal take on all of this and why it is so interesting to me. (copied and pasted from my letter to him, who btw has a very different point of reference)

"Well you know my take on it.. (my belief... not doctrine) we are learning how God does things. We are, afterall, off to the "university of life" to get man educated on these matters. That it takes generation upon generation is not an issue... for all those who have passed are still here only now in another dimension... possibly even inspiring those who go on after they are gone.. to stumble upon more truths so we can advance to whatever stage of advancement or understanding we are headed for...who knows. I am feeling like this scientifically explains how the spirit of God can be EVERYWHERE. It is, in my mind, communicating vibrationally (as we all do actually be it vocally or thru the waves and/or vibrations of photons emitting light so we can see images, relate to them and reason about them... it's all vibrations and it's all about communicating) thru the luminiferous aether or dark energy... thru the not so empty space... on the strings and stringbits that move along a lattice or grid of discrete points... that make up the dimension of spacetime that we live in. It's just so NOT hard for me to wrap my mind around it, wether I look at it scientifically or metaphysically... with the foundation I am approaching it with, it is all the same source. I see GOD in this. I don't have to separate the two.. explaination is important and for you and the blog I separate them because I realize my personal connection... is exactly that.. personal. I understand that for you it may explain the opposite, and that is okay with me. Connect it to what you believe, where it makes sense to YOU, because it is complicated, it is scientific... and it explains alot wether you believe in God or not."

now a little more explaination about strings put as simply as I can with the help of Brian Greene
(author of The Fabric of the Cosmos) 'From E = mc2 we know that mass and energy are interchangeable; (they have a fixed exchange rate, given by the speed of light times itself, c squared) Energy is produced from mass. But Einstein's equation works perfectly well in reverse- the direction in wich mass is produced from energy- and that's the direction in which string theory uses Einstein's equation. The mass of a particle in string theory is nothing but the energy of it's vibrating string. For instance, the explaination string theory offers for why one particle is heavier than another is that the string constituting the heavier particle is vibrating faster and more furiously than the string constituting the lighter particle. Faster and more furious vibratios means higher energy, and higher energy translates, via Einstein's equation, into greater mass.

Other properties of a particle such as it's electric charge and it's spin, are encoded through more subtle features of the string's vibrations. Compared with mass, these features are harder to describe nonmathematically but they follow the same basic idea: the vibrational pattern is the particle's fingerprint; all the properties that we use to distringuish one particle from another are determined by the vibrational pattern of the particles string.

Now.. there are an infinaite number of different string vibrational pattern. (Thus the many many different string theories because they arrive at them from different angles based on what vibrations they are relating to.. and yet oddly, all string theories have the same mathematical solutions... this is why they are understanding them to be approximate descriptions of a bigger theory...'M' theory rather than separate theories themselves.)

'Superstring theory (all string theories are Superstring now btw) does indeed provide a successful merger of gravity and quantum mechanics', writes Green in his book, 'However, strange as it may sound, in the early years after its discovery, physicists found that the equations of superstring theory do not have these enviable properties if the universe has three spatial dimensions. Instead, the equations of superstring theory are mathematically consistent only if the universe has nine spatial dimensions, or, including the time dimensions, they work only in a universe with ten spacetime dimensions!' In my other book.. Lee Smolin discribes this as the dimensions we experience are 'enlarged' I think that is actually pretty comprehendable. However a strange thought enters my head 'just add water' what if all the dimensions were suddenly enlarged.. how overwelming would that be to us? We would NOT understand what we were seeing... so it's a good thing this process of understanding comes line upon line.

Without going into hidden dimensions I want to explain LOOPS better. Brian actually refers to Lee Smolin's book for a detailed description and calls it 'excellent' and I agree with him! But the short version is this. 'A one sentence comparison would hold that string theorists start with the small (quantum theory) and move to embrace the large (gravity) while LOOP adherents (quantum gravity) start with the large (gravity) and move to embrace the small. In fact string theory was initially developed as a quantum theory of the strong nuclear force operating within atomic nuclei; it was realized only later, serendipitously, that the theory actually included gravity. Loop quantum gravity, on the other hand takes einsteins general relativity as it's point of departure and seeks to incorporate quantum mechanics.'

'To some extent, the main achievements of each prove to be the failings of the other. The main achievement of loop quantum gravity- an impressive one- is that it does not assume a background spacetime (string still does). Loop quantum gravity is a background independent framework. However in comparison to string theory loop quantum gravity has made far less progress in understanding the dynamics of gravitons.'

'One harmonious possibility is that the string guys and loop guys are actually constructing the same theory, but from vastly different starting points. That each theory involves loops- in string theory these are string loops; in loop quantum gravity, they're harder to describe nonmathematically but roughly speaking they are elementary loops of space - suggests there might be such a connection. This possibility is further supported by the fact that on the few problems accessible to both, such as black hole entropy, the two theories agree fully. Both theories suggest there is some kind of atomized structure to spacetime. Most convincing of all, loop researchers have calculated the allowed areas of such surfaces of space... space like electrons, come in discrete, indivisible chunks.'

Many physisists, both Brian Reene and Lee Smolin included, believe that the background independent techniques developed by the loop guys will be adaptd to string theory, paving the way for a string formulation that is background independent. And thats the spark they suspect that will ignite a third superstring revolution in which, many of the remaining deep mysteries will be solved bringing spacetimes long story full circle.

Loops, Strings and Holographic Principles

Not that anyone is reading my blogs... but I am really trying to wrap my mind around the whole spacetime thing. So here is a quote from my book setting the stage is about loop theory... and will show how spacetime can be viewed as a fractal.


" In the first we tried to formulate a gravitational theory based on the dynamics of interacting loops of quantized electric flux. We failed to formulate a string theory, and as a result we published none of this work, but it was to have very important consequences. In the second project we showed that a theory in which spacetime was discrete on small scales could solve many of the problems of quantum gravity. We did this by studying the implications of the hypothesis that the structure of spacetime was like a fractal at Planck scales. This overcame many of the difficulties of quantum gravity ,by eliminating the infinities and making the theory finite. We realized during that work that one way of making such a fractal spacetime is to build it up from a network of interacting loops. ........ (then we go into explainations of loops and such) ... It gave us an exact description of the physics of the Planck scale in which space is constructed from nothing but the relationships among a set of discrete elementary objects. These objects were still Wilson's and Polyakov's loops, but they no longer lived on a lattice, or even in space. Instead their interrelations defined space..... If we could only get rid of the background we would have a theory of nothing but loops and their topological relationships...... Carlo saw that it was the dependence on the field that was making it impossible to proceed. He also saw how to get rid of it, by using an approach to quantum theory invented by his mentor, Chris Isham, at Imperial College..... In the end we had a theory of the kind that Polyakov had spoken about as his great dream a theroy of pure loops which described an aspect of the real world in efquations so simple they could be solved exactly. And when it was used to construct the quantum version of Einstein's theory of gravity, the theory depended only on the relationships of the loops to one another- on how they knot, link and kink."


There are thousands of string theories and the math works in them ALL. So they have decided that they must be actually approximate descriptions of a bigger theory that they are calling "M" theory. (of which they do not have any principles for yet.. only that it must explain why so many string theories are consistant telling us SO much and yet at the same time they tell us so little LOL)

I was reading about the strong and weak Holographic Principles started by Leonard Susskind who has applied it to string theory.

The Strong Holographical principle tells us we can only observe something thru a screen,( like how we know anything about black holes, we measure the entropy and that indicates what is beyond.. or how much energy is there anyway.) So.. Like a television set with pixels, you can only see in the world beyond the screen as what can be represented on it. Like a quantum computer with one bit of memory for every pixel.. each pixel 2 planck lenths on each side. So if we observe any physical system, imagine you are viewing it thru a screen. You can send a signal into the screen that will interact with the 'physical system' a signal comes back (light) but an observer cannot know if it is interacting with the sytem or the image of the system. SO the best description that can be given of a part of the world that lies beyond the surface is actually a description of how the image EVOLVES on that surface.

however.. spacetime is made up of processes. Introducing the Weak Holographical Principle.

The world does not consist of things occupying regions of space. Instead all that exsists are screens on wich the world is represented (screens being any surface in space) so the weak holographic principle states that space is nothing but a way of channeling information from one observer to another. The geometry of that space as measured in area and volume is nothing but a measure of the capacity of a screen to transmit information.

Then the world would be a network of holograms each coded within it information about the relationships with others. (a network of relationships and/or processes wich define the geometry of spacetime... like a fractal and feed information along the discrete points wich are in the unfixed not absolute spacetime and communicating it to any physical system and observer of that physical system) wow look at me.. did I really just type that? LOL

Thus.. the history of the Universe would be a flow of information.

*SIGH Now I know what the attraction to Science Fiction is all about.. and from where the talent and imagination comes from... These smart geeky dudes can't stop thinking about this stuff.. and because the more you know, the more you realize you don't know... your mind starts to soar trying to comprehend and make a file for it in your tiny little mathmatically challenged brain.